Finite element analysis based on volume CAD

Volume CAD, which is being developed at RIKEN, will be a common platform for storing and handling volume data in manufacturing processes. In VCAD, both geometry and volume data are represented as attributes of a set of cells in a simple voxel or octree data structure. In this paper, a method by which to conduct highly accurate structural analysis by directly using VCAD data is proposed. A degenerated hexahedral mesh representing the precise geometry of an object is generated from VCAD data, and finite element analysis is then conducted using the mesh. The proposed method is compared with the X-FEM, and the performances of these two methods are shown to be approximately the same. The robustness of the proposed method is demonstrated by presenting numerical examples of stamping tools.